My Year of Rest
and Relaxation

One hot New York summer, a young woman decides to sleep for a year. She has made provisions: she has left her job, the rent on her loft has been paid in advance and her therapist is hysterical enough to prescribe her sleeping pills à discretion. A retreat into your own four walls for several months – voluntarily?

The novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, a rising star of the US literary scene, is simultaneously a vexing manifesto for a departure from meritocracy and a sleepwalking ballad about repression and evanescence.